B.Sc. Eng. Hons. (Moratuwa), M.E.Sc. (Western, Canada), Ph.D. (Western, Canada), SMIEEE
Designation :
Head of Department
Email :
ranga@uom.lkOffice :
+94 11 264 0422I am a senior lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I work in the area of computer vision. Within this, surveillance, scene understanding, tracking, and activity recognition are of particular interest. We extensively use deep learning for our work. Our current work includes learning in robotics, making deep networks more effective by exploring new architectures, developing new routing algorithms, and improving convolution layers.
Ranga Rodrigo is an alumnus of Maris Stella College, Negombo, Sri Lanka. He obtained his B.Sc. Eng. degree with first-class honors in the year 2000 from the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and M.E.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Western University, Canada, in the year 2004 and 2008 respectively with Prof. Jagath Samarabandu. His research interests are in the general area of computer vision and deep learning for vision. Currently, is with the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, as a Senior Lecturer. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), USA.
Curriculum Vitae
Please find my curriculum vitae here.
Meeting Me
Either drop by or contact me over phone or email to make an appointment.
Links
The University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
Resources
Literature Search and Analysis.
Quotation
“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”
Information for Students
Semester Coordinators and Others
| Semester 2: | Dr. Ranga Rodrigo |
| Semester 3: | Dr. Tharaka Samarasinghe |
| Semester 4: | Dr. Jayathu Samarawickrama |
| Semester 5: | Dr. Chamira Edussooriya |
| Semester 6: | Dr. Peshala Jayasekara |
| Semester 7: | Dr. Mevan Gunawardena |
| Semester 8: | Dr. Anjula De Silva |
| Industrial training: | Dr. Peshala Jayasekara |
| Time table: | Dr. Jayathu Samarawickrama |
| FAC member: | Dr. Ranga Rodrigo |
Honors and Awards
| 2019 | Outstanding Research Performances Award “Award of excelence in recognition of the outstanding research performances for 2018”, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. |
| 2014 | President’s Award for Scientific Publication “For scientific research evaluated by peers and published in the year 2009 in international scientific journals cited in the Science Citation Index, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics—Part B: Cybernetics 2009, Vol. 39, Iss. 3 pp. 658–671.” |
| 2013 | Outstanding Research Performances Award “Award of excelence in recognition of the outstanding research performances for the three years ending in 31st December 2010”, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. |
| 2010 | Outstanding Research Performances Award “Award of excelence in recognition of the outstanding research performances for the three years ending in 31st December 2009”, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. |
| 2008-2009 | Supervising Award Winning Student Project I supervised Lahiru Priyadarshana’s project on converting a regular LCD to a touchable screen using computer vision. This project won the gold medal at the National Best Quality Software Awards organized by the British Computer Society, Sri Lanka Section. |
| 2007 | Award for Research Excellence At the annual Western Research Forum organized by the Society of Graduate Students at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. |
| 2007 | Outstanding Research Presentation “Award for the Outstanding Presentation in Graduate Symposium 2007 in Robotics and Control” at the Graduate Symposium of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. |
| 1997 | Highest Average “Award for the Student Who Obtained the Highest Average at the First Year Examination in Engineering” for the academic year 95/96 |
Journals
- Ranga Rodrigo, Mehrnaz Zouqi, Zhenhe Chen, Jagath Samarabandu, “Robust and efficient feature tracking for indoor navigation”, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics), 2009
- Mike Sewell, Jagath Samarabandu, Ranga Rodrigo, Kenneth McIsaac, “The rank-scaled mutation rate for genetic algorithms”, International Journal of Information Technology, 2006
- Sameera Ramasinghe, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Vinoj Jayasundara, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Ranga Rodrigo, Ajith A Pasqual, “Combined static and motion features for deep-networks based activity recognition in videos”, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2019
- Zhenhe Chen, Ranga Rodrigo, Vijay Parsa, Jagath Samarabandu, “Using ultrasonic and vision sensors within extended kalman filter for robot navigation”, Canadian Acoustics, 2005
- Dumindu Tissera, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Rukshan Wijesinghe, Subha Fernando, Ranga Rodrigo, “Context-aware multipath networks”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11519, 2019
- Ranga Rodrigo, Zhenhe Chen, Jagath Samarabandu, “Energy based video synthesis”, Proc. 5th WSEAS Int. Conf. Telecommunications and Informatics, 2006
- Ranga Rodrigo, “Morphological image processing”, Univ. Moratuwa, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, Tech. Rep, 2009
- Shashi Gunawardane, Ravindra Koggalage, Ranga Rodrigo, Senaka Rajapakse, “A computer-based icu patient alert and decision support system”, Sri Lanka Journal of Critical Care, 2009
- Hirunima Jayasekara, Vinoj Jayasundara, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Sandaru Jayasekara, Suranga Seneviratne, Ranga Rodrigo, “TimeCaps: Capturing Time Series Data with Capsule Networks”, ArXiv, abs/1911.11800, 2019
Conferences
- Jathushan Rajasegaran, Vinoj Jayasundara, Sandaru Jayasekara, Hirunima Jayasekara, Suranga Seneviratne, Ranga Rodrigo, “Deepcaps: Going deeper with capsule networks”, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2019
- KG Manosha Chathuramali, Ranga Rodrigo, “Faster human activity recognition with SVM”, International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer2012), 2012
- Vinoj Jayasundara, Sandaru Jayasekara, Hirunima Jayasekara, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Suranga Seneviratne, Ranga Rodrigo, “Textcaps: Handwritten character recognition with very small datasets”, 2019 IEEE winter conference on applications of computer vision (WACV), 2019
- Ranga Rodrigo, Wenxia Shi, Jagath Samarabandu, “Energy based line detection”, 2006 Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2006
- Ranga Dabarera, Ranga Rodrigo, “Vision based elephant recognition for management and conservation”, 2010 Fifth International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2010
- Mahendra Samarawickrama, Ajith Pasqual, Ranga Rodrigo, “FPGA-based compact and flexible architecture for real-time embedded vision systems”, 2009 International Conference on industrial and information systems (ICIIS), 2009
- Sameera Ramasinghe, Ranga Rodrigo, “Action recognition by single stream convolutional neural networks: An approach using combined motion and static information”, 2015 3rd IAPR Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR), 2015
- Ranga Rodrigo, Jagath Samarabandu, “Monocular vision for robot navigation”, IEEE International Conference Mechatronics and Automation, 2005, 2005
- Duane J Jacques, Ranga Rodrigo, Kenneth A McIsaac, Jagath Samarabandu, “An object tracking and visual servoing system for the visually impaired”, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2005
- T Ajanthan, P Kamalaruban, Ranga Rodrigo, “Automatic number plate recognition in low quality videos”, Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS), 2013 8th IEEE International Conference on, 2013
- Ranga Rodrigo, Zhenhe Chen, Jagath Samarabandu, “Feature motion for monocular robot navigation”, 2006 International Conference on Information and Automation, 2006
- Buddhika Maldeniya, Dinindu Nawarathna, Kanishka Wijayasekara, Tharindu Wijegoonasekara, Ranga Rodrigo, “Computationally efficient implementation of video rectification in an FPGA for stereo vision applications”, 2010 Fifth International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2010
- TSFW Gunawardane, Ravindra Koggalage, Ranga Rodrigo, Senaka Rajapakse, “Patient alert and decision support system”, 2009 International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications, 2009
- Duane J Jacques, Ranga Rodrigo, Kenneth A McIsaac, Jagath Samarabandu, “An application framework for measuring the performance of a visual servo control of a reaching task for the visually impaired”, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 2007
- Sameera Ramasinghe, KG Manosha Chathuramali, Ranga Rodrigo, “Recognition of badminton strokes using dense trajectories”, 7th International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2014
- KG Manosha Chathuramali, Sameera Ramasinghe, Ranga Rodrigo, “Abnormal activity recognition using spatio-temporal features”, 7th International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2014
- Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Ranga Rodrigo, “Use of a visual word dictionary for topic discovery in images”, 2010 Fifth International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2010
- Anuruddha L Hettiarachchi, Heshani O Thathsarani, Pamuditha U Wickramasinghe, Dilranjan S Wickramasuriya, Ranga Rodrigo, “Extensible video surveillance software with simultaneous event detection for low and high density crowd analysis”, 7th International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2014
- Zhenhe Chen, Ranga Rodrigo, Jagath Samarabandu, “Implementation of an update scheme for monocular visual slam”, 2006 International Conference on Information and Automation, 2006
- Dileepa Joseph Jayamanne, Jayathu Samarawickrama, Ranga Rodrigo, “Appearance Based Tracking with Background Subtraction”, International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2013
- Farlin Mohideen, Ranga Rodrigo, “Curvature Based Robust Descriptors.”, BMVC, 2012
- Kumara Kahatapitiya, Dumindu Tissera, Ranga Rodrigo, “Context-Aware Automatic Occlusion Removal”, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2019
- Tharindu D Gamage, Jayathu G Samarawickrama, Ranga Rodrigo, Ajith A Pasqual, “Image filtering with MapReduce in pseudo-distribution mode”, 2015 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon), 2015
- N Ganganath, G Attanayake, TY Bandara, P Ilangakoon, R Rodrigo, A Madanayake, LT Bruton, “Scanned-array audio beamforming using 2nd- and 3rd-order 2D IIR beam filters on FPGA”, 2010 International Conference on Microelectronics, 2010
- Eranga Ukwatta, Ranga Rodrigo, Jagath Samarabandu, Mike Hall, “Vision based spectroscopy simulation”, 2008 Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision, 2008
- Ramesha Karunasena, Piumi Sandarenu, Madushi Pinto, Achala Athukorala, Ranga Rodrigo, Peshala Jayasekara, “Devi: Open-source human-robot interface for interactive receptionist systems”, 2019 IEEE 4th International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Mechatronics (ICARM), 2019
- Madhura Pathegama, Dileepa Marasinghe, Kanishka Wijayasekara, Ishan Karunanayake, Chamira Edussooriya, Pujitha Silva, Ranga Rodrigo, “Moving Kinect-Based Gait Analysis with Increased Range”, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2018
- Anton Jeran Ratnarajah, Sahani Goonetilleke, Dumindu Tissera, Kapilan Balagopalan, Ranga Rodrigo, “Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis”, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2018
- Mahendra Samarawickrama, Ranga Rodrigo, Ajith Pasqual, “Scalable FPGA-based multiprocessor architecture for real-time embedded vision”, 2010 Fifth International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, 2010
Research
Reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully trained for games like GO, Atari, and Chess in simulated environments. However, in cue sport-based games like Carrom, real world is unpredictable unlike in Chess and GO due to the stochastic nature of the gameplay as well as the effect of external factors such as friction combined with multiple collisions. Hence, solely training in a simulated platform for games like Billiard and Carrom, which need precise execution of a shot, would not be ideal in actual gameplay. This paper presents a real-time vision-based efficient robotic system to play Carrom against a proficient human opponent. We demonstrate the challenges of adopting a reinforcement learning algorithm beyond simulations in implementing strategic gameplay for the robotic system. We currently achieve an overall shot accuracy of 70.6% by combining heuristic and reinforcement learning algorithms. Analysis of the overall results suggests the possibility of adopting real-world training for board games that need precise mechanical actuation beyond simulations.
Naveen Karunanayake, Achintha Wijesinghe, Chameera Wijethunga, Chinthani Kumaradasa, Peshala Jayasekara, and Ranga Rodrigo, “Towards a Smart Opponent for Board Games: Learning beyond Simulations,” in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Toronto, CA (virtual), 2020, pp. 1–8.
Context-Aware Occlusion Removal
In this work, we identify objects that do not relate to the image context as occlusions and remove them, reconstructing the space occupied coherently. We detect occlusions by considering the relation between foreground and background object classes represented by vector embeddings, and removes them through inpainting. Notice how the skier has been automatically removed.
Kumara Kahatapitiya, Dumindu Tissera, and Ranga Rodrigo, “ Context-Aware Automatic Occlusion Removal,” in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Taipei, Taiwan, September 2019, pp. 1–4.
URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02710
Extensions to Capsule Networks
We extended the capsule networks taking several paths. In the TextCaps work, we adjust the instantiation parameters with random controlled noise to generate new training samples from the existing samples, with realistic augmentations which reflect actual variations that are present in human hand writing. Our results with a mere 200 training samples per class surpass existing character recognition results in MNIST and several other datasets. In DeepCaps we developed a deep capsule network architecture which uses a novel 3D convolution based dynamic routing algorithm. Further, we propose a class-independent decoder network, which strengthens the use of reconstruction loss as a regularization term. This leads to an interesting property of the decoder, which allows us to identify and control the physical attributes of the images represented by the instantiation parameters.
Vinoj Jayasundara, Sandaru Jayasekara, Hirunima Jayasekara, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Suranga Seneviratne, and Ranga Rodrigo, “TextCaps: Handwritten Character Recognition With Very Small Datasets,” in Proceedings of IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, Waikoloa, HI, January 2019, pp. 254–262.
URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8658735
Jathushan Rajasegaran, Vinoj Jayasundara, Sandaru Jayasekara, Hirunima Jayasekara, Suranga Seneviratne, and Ranga Rodrigo, “ DeepCaps: Going Deeper with Capsule Networks,” in Proceedings of IEEE CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Long Beach, CA, June 2019, pp. 1–9.
URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09546